Awareness and Attitude

By Annette Rey

I came across this piece of profound wisdom and want to share it with writers and any person trying to maneuver through life’s journey.

When you need a lifeline, you need a reminder like this.

Life overtakes us too many times. We plan, we struggle, we hit walls. Sometimes we just feel like throwing in the towel (cliché). Writers face these same issues when their story is just not working out. Do we toss our work, do we give up? Some writers actually quit writing entirely.

We can get lost and confused. What happens in real life when you are faced with a daughter on drugs, a cheating husband or wife? Time moves too fast for us to catch up with answers. Writers facing a deadline experience the time crunch and can feel similarly overwhelmed.

Sometimes a simple, plain, almost mundane statement can spark the blazing light that leads us down the right path to resolution of our problems. I found this enlightenment in a statement by Albert Einstein.

“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”

This hit me as a need for awareness that we need outside help. We know this right? But we seem to need reminders of this because so often we are within our life issues and our writing and we can’t see the forest for the trees (cliché). So we sort of run like mice in a maze (simile), trying to find answers within our problems. It may sound elementary to hear, but we must look outside our world; we must back off and get distance to see clearly.

After we become aware, we must change our attitude. That is, we must be open and admit someone else may have information for us; someone else may be smarter than us. We have to become humble. We have to become submissive.

Humble and submissive are words that offend the “modern” people of today. We are supposed to be dominant, knowing, cued-in, self-assured, even arrogant so as never to indicate any kind of weakness or lack of knowledge.

BUT, as people and as writers, we harm ourselves if we don’t look at ourselves as the problem. If you shed whatever limits you, you allow yourself to let go and search outside yourself for an answer. This can be a scary step because it requires change, change within ourselves and change in the way we approach problems.

You should welcome change. You will grow. And along the way, you will get closer to solving your problems – life problems and writing problems.

Seek information to improve your life and your writing – accept and apply, or reject and move on. Continue to learn. Never give up.

I remind you once again:

“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”

Happy living! Happy writing!